To get out the vote, Gov. Larry Hogan is getting into voters’ devices.

The Republican governor — who effectively used Facebook to help him win the 2014 election — is now gaining traction with digital-savvy supporters through a new venue: a mobile app that rewards them for their mobilizing efforts.

And two Democratic gubernatorial candidates hoping to challenge Hogan in November have been using some of the latest technology to help them expand their reach beyond physical glad-handing, phone-banking and median-waving.

While digital organizing made significant advances during the 2016 national election, Maryland voters haven’t been exposed to such electoral leaps for four years — practically a lifetime in technological innovation.

“The technology is evolving quickly,” said Adam Sheingate, a Johns Hopkins University political science professor.

Candidates and their political consultants will brag about the effectiveness of their cutting-edge technology to connect and rally supporters, but gauging real impact is not so easy, said Sheingate, who has studied the ways U.S. campaigns have used technology back to the advent of radio.

Hogan’s campaign, however, is sold on its app.

“It’s no secret that people are living on their phones,” said Doug Mayer, a spokesman for Hogan’s campaign. “We want our supporters to do everything they would normally do in grassroots field campaigning. We want them to take that field experience and translate it into their mobile device.”

Within the first two weeks of launching the app on May 31, 500 people had downloaded it, Mayer said.

The app’s privacy policy notes that it may collect data from the user’s mobile address book and from the user’s social media accounts when they are linked to the app — a potential point of concern for users.

Mayer said the campaign won’t share that data with other groups or businesses.

“Everything is opt-in,” Mayer said. “Any information our campaign collects, whether it’s through person-to-person contact, whether it’s through contributions or this app, is secured through the highest industry standards, including encryption technology.”

Two of the Democratic candidates seeking to win Tuesday’s primary election for governor — Alec Ross and state Sen. Richard S. Madaleno Jr. — have been encouraging their supporters to use a tool called VoterCircle that scans their email address books to help them send out email blasts to their contacts.

Shaun Daniels, Ross’ campaign manager, said the campaign was aware that supporters might be wary about sharing email addresses — especially since it was revealed that the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica collected private data from millions of Facebook users without their knowledge.

“We all work in politics, we all saw Cambridge Analytica and all that,” Daniels said. “In order for us to use it, we had to be satisfied.”

Baltimore Sun reporter Doug Donovan contributed to this article.

pwood@baltsun.com

twitter.com/pwoodreporter